Wireshark Is Great — Here's Why It's Not Enough for Production Networks

It was 2 AM on a Tuesday when the on-call engineer finally opened Wireshark on his laptop, plugged into a mirror port on the core switch, and started capturing packets. The e-commerce platform had been experiencing intermittent 500 errors for six hours. APM dashboards showed elevated latency but couldn't pinpoint the source. SNMP polling reported all interfaces healthy. The CDN was fine. The database looked normal. After 40 minutes of scrolling through a 2 GB pcap file, filtering by retransmissi